The so-called “Central Park Five” sued former President Donald Trump Monday, saying he made “false and defamatory” statements about them during last month’s presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron Brown and Korey Wise filed the civil complaint in US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, alleging Trump, 78, “falsely stated” that they had “killed an individual and pled guilty to the crime.”
“These statements are demonstrably false. Plaintiffs never pled guilty to any crime and were subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing,” lawyers for the quintet wrote in the 18-page filing. “Further, the victims of the Central Park assaults were not killed.”
The plaintiffs have demanded $225,000 in damages for defamation, false light and intentional inflection of emotional distress.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung fired back that the lawsuit was “another frivolous, Election Interference lawsuit, filed by desperate left-wing activists, in an attempt to distract the American people from Kamala Harris’s dangerously liberal agenda and failing campaign.”
“The frantic lawfare efforts by Lyin’ Kamala’s allies to interfere in the election are going nowhere and President Trump is dominating as he marches to a historic win for the American people on November 5th,” Cheung added.
In 1990, a Manhattan jury convicted Salaam, Santana, Brown, Richardson and Wise, who are black and Hispanic, of assaulting and raping Patricia Meili, a white woman who was jogging in Central Park on the night of April 19, 1989.
Salaam, Santana, Brown and Richardson were also convicted of assaults and a robbery of two other joggers in the park the same night.
All were forced into providing confessions without an attorney present before trial.
Then a prominent real estate mogul, Trump took out full-page ads in New York dailies on May 1, 1989, that declared in their headlines: “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!”
The ad did not name the Central Park Five but discussed particulars of the case as evidence of the lawlessness then-pervasive in the Big Apple.
All five convictions were overturned in 2002, when a confession and DNA evidence linked serial rapist Matias Reyes to the Meili assault. By then, however, the five-year statute of limitations had passed.
The other assault convictions were also based on the forced confessions and subsequently vacated. Salaam is now a New York City councilmember.
Harris, 60, invoked the Central Park Five’s case in the Sept. 10 debate when asked about the former president’s remarks that the vice president “happened to turn black” and wielded her racial identity for political advantage.
“Let’s remember, this is the same individual who took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five young black and Latino boys who were innocent, the Central Park Five,” Harris said of the 45th president’s use of “race to divide the American people.”
“This is the most divisive presidency in the history of our country,” Trump pushed back. “There’s never been anything like it. They’re destroying our country. And they come up with things like what she just said going back many, many years when a lot of people, including Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five.”
“They pled guilty,” Trump said, inaccurately. “And I said, ‘Well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately.’”
In 2014, the five settled a civil rights lawsuit with the city for $40.75 million over the wrongful conviction. In a New York Daily News op-ed, Trump called the settlement “a disgrace.”
“Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts,” he wrote. “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.”
The men appeared at the Democratic National Convention in August alongside the Rev. Al Sharpton to stump for Harris.
“Forty-five wanted us un-alive. He wanted us dead,” Salaam said. “He dismisses the scientific evidence rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed, and he never will.”
